iRis AG Reviewed by The Daily App show

There are a few reviews for iRis up now, but this one by the Daily App Show is in swishy youtube video format, and they say nice things about us, so I’m posting this one up here for all to see.

BWC ‘09 Entry Update: Best Modelling Spot Prize Winner!

Here is my entry for the 2009 Blender World Cup. The theme was “Another World”. I came up with a crashed fighter pilot marooned on a strange jungle planet, inhabited by giant bugs. It’s pretty busy, so view full size to take it all in.

Update: My entry won the spot prize for best modelling. I’m really happy about this as I think it reflects the elements I did best on. Next year I’ll focus on other areas, to try and up my game and take one of the top prizes.

iRis AG Released!

So for the past few months I have been working for Rogue Pirate Ninja interactive on a game for the iPhone called iRis. The game is a 3D tile matching game much like Columns or Tetris, with the cool twist that instead of moving the falling block as it descends, you rotate the rest of the world underneath it. It’s pretty darn fun and we’re all rather proud to have made it.  So without further ado here’s the trailer:

So what are you waiting for? It’s only $2 on the iPhone App Store, so Go buy it!
Anyway, I thought I’d write up a post about what it’s been like working on the game. More after the jump…

Panic Elbow Album Cover III

The third piece of album art I’ve produced for Panic Elbow, and probably my favourite. This one was inspired by an alchemy sketch I did whilst listening to one of their songs – it had a darker feel than their other music, and obviously given the name, I thought it made a fitting accompaniment.

As usual, I encourage you to go and listen to their music on their MySpace page.

Alchemy

I came across Alchemy while watching David Leroy’s fantastic speedpainting video of a piece of Durian concept art. It’s a really nice way of generating some chaos to help inspire your drawing. The interface is mininmalistic and intuitive, and to tools create some really interesting shapes whilst also allowing a decent amount of control for once you want to start picking out specific forms. I’m not the greatest painter, but I think I managed some interesting results, starting with alchemy and then moving to GIMP to do the main part of the painting.

Soldier Sketch

Drawings based on random forms

Panic Elbow – Every Cliche

Another piece of cover art I did for a friends band: Panic Elbow. Made with blender and the Gimp. The album isn’t out yet but I wanted to show it off. In the meantime you can check out their current music on the band’s myspace page, check them out!

I also did them an EP cover a while back.

Family Crest

For my fathers birthday this year I created a model of my family crest and had it printed in 3D by Shapeways. The final model arrived the other day and I’m pretty pleased with how it looks. Unfortunately I only have a point and shoot camera with fairly limited macro capabilities, so the photos don’t look that great, but I include a Luxrender render to show the details too.

Painting With Polygons

Here’s a great technique that popped up on the forums, based on a siggraph paper by Isaac Botkin (link), here’s their video:

What intrigued me about the technique is that it doesn’t rely on any fancy algorithm, plug-in or rendering technique. Instead it uses displacement mapping to perturb the surface of the model and then motion-blurs the results of several displacements per frame to give the result. If the displacement is applied cyclically, i.e. it oscillates once per frame, then this is consistent over multiple frames and can even be used for animation. I’ve been having a play at doing this in blender and here are the results I’ve had so far:

For the truly interested, here’s a blendfile. More after the jump…

Modeling Timelapse – Belle 2.0 Part II

The second part of my steampunk style android project.

Creating tileable patterns with GIMP, Inkscape and Blender

Trying to isolate a tileable pattern from a photo or sketch to use in your 2D and 3D projects can be a pain, and often involves tedious tracing of patterns by hand. I’ve come up with a method for generating tileable raster/vector/3D curve based patterns from photos that automates some of the tedious parts and gives good results, using the free and open source softwares GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender.